BACI is the World trade database developed by the CEPII at a high level of product disaggregation.

Original data are provided by the United Nations Statistical Division (COMTRADE database). BACI is constructed using an original procedure that reconciles the declarations of the exporter and the importer. This harmonization procedure enables to extend considerably the number of countries for which trade data are available, as compared to the original dataset.

BACI provides bilateral values and quantities of exports at the HS 6-digit product disaggregation, for more than 200 countries since 1995. It is updated every year.

BACI is available for researchers already subscribing to the United Nations COMTRADE database. Users of BACI have to testify that their organization or themselves have an active UN Comtrade subscription to download BACI.

Methodology: a Short Description

Original procedures have been developed to reconcile data reported by almost 150 countries to the United Nations Statistics Division.

First, as import values are reported CIF (cost, insurance and freight) while exports are reported FOB (free on board), CIF costs are estimated and removed from imports values to compute FOB import values.Second, the reliability of country reporting is assessed based on the reporting distances among partners. These reporting qualities are used as weights in the reconciliation of each bilateral trade flow twice reported.

Taking advantage of this double information on each flow, we end up with a large coverage of countries not reporting at a given level of the product classification.

Ther dataset gives information about the value of trade (v, in thousands of US dollars) and the quantity (q, in tons). Individual trade flows are identified by the exporter (i), the importer (j), the product category (hs6) and the year (t). BACI is available with versions 1992, 1996, and 2002 of the Harmonized System (HS) with 6-digit disaggregation.